t those
hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while
the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read
all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The
sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her
brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay
for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness,
promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered
in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but
one.

And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been
vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia
to herself. It was a thing to bask in--that look--like the fervid sun
itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet
always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes:
"You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!"
And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing
under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back
of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.

"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you," she said to him while
they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day.
The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along
the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for
this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing
the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come
next."

"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of
telling when a land is real."

"You have?"

"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia
or----"

"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly--"or India's coral strand.
That's quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy
traveler you must have been!"

"And no land can be real where you are not," he went on gravely. "I go
where you go, follow you around the world and out into the stars beyond
the moon, up and down and on forever, and it all seems real to me--all
except you."

"Oh, I--I'm real, real enough, but this land is a sad, fearful,
threatening land, so heartless." She shivered. "Let us go in!"

"That's only because it's closing up now for the winter; that's why the
sky